You’ve Already Wasted Too Much Time Reading This Headline

The cost of waiting has gone up. Actions are measured in minutes, not months. Ideas are only as good as the speed at which they’re deployed.

At the risk of disrupting a proper lede beyond all recognition, this is the message Lori Senecal of Kirshenbaum bond senecal + partners shared with a lunch audience at the Wired Business conference Tuesday.

And now, back to it:

Need another week for that project? Senecal argues that what you need is less time, not more. “If you want to get it done, give it to the busiest person,” she said. Or do it yourself. Eliminate process steps, pass offs and interruptions. And hire makers, not just thinkers. Or at least people who have a Makerbot, perhaps?

Don’t fear information overload. Embrace it.

Senecal’s partner, Mick McCabe, on the importance of customer intimacy – and how poorly most companies foster it. The problem stems from the paradigm of the soul-killing sterile boardroom. To figure out what your customer wants, look at her texts for a week. Also, embrace extremism. Find out what people love or hate and figure out why. Co-create with your customers. Track their behavior obsessively.

As the chief innovation officer of MDC Partners, Faris Yakob described his job as to channel the mindset of a five-year-old child by endlessly asking “Why?” With a full head of dreadlocks, he was arguably the weirdest person in the room, but he insisted that originality is a myth. “Nothing comes from nobody,” he said, explaining that the last original thing that happened was the Big Bang. The rest has been a remix.

Yakob thinks distraction is fertile. Instead of taking a long walk to get away from it all, go to Twitter. Let the endless stream of data wash over you like a stream.

MDC and kbs+p practice what they preach. Two weeks ago, they had the idea for a smart phone app called “Twit Hit.” A cross between “Bump” and “Twitter,” the application will allow people to follow each other on Twitter with a bump of their phones. Today, they submitted the app to the Apple store and expect it to be available within one week. It’s a simple, single-purpose technology based off of existing apps.